Making A Killing

How Robert Scott Wilson became DAYS’s unlikeliest leading man

- Janet Di Lauro

To the holdouts among DAYS fans who refuse to see Ben Weston as a romantic leading man, let alone root for his pairing with Victoria Konefal’s Ciara, actor Robert Scott Wilson has a message for you. “I get it, man,” he says. “Ben’s done some terrible s**t. He’s a multiple murderer. He was on this streak of terror that made me bristle.”

Yet the man behind the reformed Necktie Killer also wants to point something out. “The group of people that are the naysayers, the ones who won’t buy redeeming a serial killer, is getting smaller and smaller,” announces Wilson with a smile. That, coupled with the support of legions of Ciara and Ben fans — “We have an army behind us,” notes the actor — has been a driving force behind his reinvention of Ben.

“There’s nobody like him,” contends Wilson. “Ben’s a loner ... this antihero. My favorite characters ever are the antiheroes; these unconventional guys who do good things but are bad dudes. One of my favorite actors, Leo DiCaprio, plays a lot of them, like Billy in The Departed and Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. Don Draper is another one, and so is Tony Soprano. He does awful things but loves his family. There’s something cool about those characters and I’ve always been drawn to them. The fact that this role has turned into that is just awesome.”